Let me begin by inviting you on a challenging, radical journey that over time, is certain to penetrate the depths of your belief system. Let me also remind you that truth sets us free. The opposite of truth is lies. If you build your life on truth, freedom is the inevitable result. If your life is built upon lies, slavery is the inevitable result. 1 By seeking God for unanswered questions, we are actually seeking truth for solid answers! this fact: truth cannot change. If you will remember from previous lessons, it is okay to question what you believe and why you believe it. In fact, you had better know what you believe and why you believe it. I have found that some people simply need someone else to tell them it is okay to question God and/or the Bible. God is big enough to handle your questions. He also loves for us to seek truth with all of our heart. By seeking God for unanswered questions, we are actually seeking truth for solid answers! Your beliefs must also line up perfectly with the plumb line of Scripture within its correct context! Therefore, as you begin to challenge your own belief system, if you are brave enoughor should I say if you are desperate enough you can rest assured of Truth is a person Jesus Christ. He does not and He cannot change. He desires for you to know absolute truth Himself. During your process of discovery, as revelation pierces your heart, if what you believe changes, then whatever was formerly believed must not have been truth. If what you believe stands the test of time, pressure, and stresses, then truth is rooted deep within you. You do have the capacity to choose to believe half-truths (lies). However, as you truly seek God with all you have and are, I trust that He will reveal truth to your innermost parts. He has been waiting for you to get to a place where you finally dive into His rich love for you. When God revealed some of these truths to me, I thought I was crazy! I wondered if I had become so twisted in my understanding that I was actually being deceived into believing lies and began to wonder if I was placing my faith in the wrong perception of what God intended for us to know through Scripture. I had been in church my whole life though never paid much attention and I never heard these truths. Therefore, when God revealed these things, I spent months on my face seeking God for solid answers and dissecting the Bible to see if this reality was my distorted perception or if it was actually rock-solid truth. God has certainly connected many dots in my life, but nothing has compared to the experience of Scripture coming together and connecting thousands of verses and passages that never made much sense before these truths were revealed in my heart. I am finding that for those truly seeking absolute truth at the core of who they are, these truths become the life and hope they never imagined possible. I am also finding that for those who are very comfortable in their beliefs through what they have been taught, along with a good dose of being a good Christian, these truths scare them terribly. Why? Because the truths shared in the remainder of our time together are not the common ways of looking at God, ourselves, or the Bible. And that makes some people uncomfortable! If you do not see yourself like God sees you, you will not experience the fullness of life that God has designed for you to experience this side of heaven.
If you do not see yourself as God sees you, you will not experience the fullness of life that God has designed for you to experience this side of heaven. God is not confused about how He sees you. He sees you one way and one way only. To agree with God to believe you are exactly who He says that you are is to see yourself as God sees you. Only as you see yourself as He sees you will you begin to understand the truth about who you are. The truth about who you are is not based upon your perceptions or experiences it is based upon what God says about you. What God says about you is the truth about who you are, period! You receive the benefit of truth setting you free as you agree with Him and trust Him to bring you through new encounters, revelations, and experiences to seal that truth deep within your belief system. Listen, your life is not what needs to change. Jesus has already exchanged your life for His life. Now, He lives instead of the old you. This is how God sees you. What needs to change is how we see ourselves. I believe that God gave us the example of a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly for the purpose of helping us understand what happened (from His perspective), the moment we were born again. If a caterpillar had a choice to become a butterfly, as we have a choice to become a new creation, this is what the scenario might look like: God would approach the caterpillar (God always initiates the relationship) and ask him, Have you ever dreamed of flying? Have you ever dreamed of soaring through the air effortlessly instead of inching around on the ground through the muck and grime you have spent your life wading through? Would you like to become something brand new? I would like to deposit my life inside of you so that others can see how much I love them, too. I would like to take your old life and give you a new one! Will you accept this brand new identity I want to give you? This will not be an easy process, but it will be worth every moment; will you trust me? Will you accept this gift? The caterpillar asks: What will it cost me? God naturally responds, It will cost you everything you have ever known, but will you trust me? Some caterpillars would want to learn more about this new life, so they would begin to study how to become a new creation. They would gracefully interview other, more knowledgeable caterpillars. They might even run across a few butterflies, who seek them out, to tell them about the new life God is offering. However, becoming a butterfly seems too far out of reach for them. After all, I m just a caterpillar. As the caterpillar dredges through more muck and mire, he finally takes God up on His offer. A new life sounds pretty good compared to the life he has lived up until that point. So, he receives God s gift of a new life. The new life is pretty cool at first. The caterpillar truly feels different. His friends even tell him how different he looks. In fact, some of his friends don t even recognize him because he looks so different. But pretty soon, his old habits and patterns resurface and he wonders if any real change actually took place. So, God brings His mirror of truth to show him the butterfly He sees as He looks in his direction. But as he looks at the mirror, he still sees a caterpillar. Why? What he sees is processed through his current reality lens, which validates what he thought to be true. I have not truly changed, he says. So, he gets busy trying to make the change happen himself. 2
After a few trips of inching and crawling around the mountain, in utter desperation, the caterpillar looks to God and cries for help. God responds again with His mirror of truth. Notice that God did not change His strategy. God offers what He already knows will make the only difference: His perspective, which is absolute truth. This time, the little caterpillar asks God to let him see what God sees. For a moment, the caterpillar pushes away the current reality lens and looks at the mirror of truth and for the first time, sees himself from God s perspective. He sees a vibrant, colorful butterfly. His mouth drops open, he lifts his head, and his wings begin to shake off the mud they have accumulated while they had dragged on the ground. He wonders, Why have I been crawling on the ground all this time? God truly changed me, yet I could not see myself as He sees me. Then, effortlessly, he became the flying insect God intended. He flaps his wings and soars through the air as God had promised that he would be able to do! The butterfly finally experiences the abundant life he was created to experience. The new life he now encounters on a daily basis is enough to motivate him to seek out all the caterpillars in his sphere of influence and tell them about this new life that is available for them as well. His love for the God who produced this new life in Him is enough to motivate him to refrain from engaging in the former things that the old caterpillar engaged in. His thought process would resemble something like Why would I gnaw on leaves when I can eat fruit and nectar? Why would I continue to inch along the dirty ground when I can soar through the air? Why would I want to live like a defeated caterpillar when I am a new creation a beautiful butterfly? I am not who or what I used to be that is NOT who I am. Now, his life will be much different because he knows the truth about who he is! I realize this story is fictitious, but it illustrates exactly what many of us needlessly go through in our Christian experience. Sometimes it takes another perspective for us to see what is happening in our own lives. As we end this story, a few thoughts come to mind. First, when the caterpillar changes into a butterfly, such a dramatic change happens in its outer appearance that anyone can see a visible change. On the contrary, when an individual is born again, the true change happens on the inside. If we were changed outwardly, it might be easier to believe that we are who God says we are. However, God does His work on the inside, not the outside. His internal work is complete the instant we are born again; we are simply unaware of that fact. We spend the rest of our lives having the totality of our salvation revealed as we walk with God. Also, His internal work forces us to live by faith, because in the midst of our many processes, we cannot actually see the internal changes God produced the moment we were saved. Once we understand that we truly have been completely changed, our lives naturally reflect outwardly what God has produced inwardly. It is a matter of your belief system changing so that your thought process and actions agree with God. Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16). Secondly, because we do not change outwardly (except for a change in countenance, loving others, and behaviors), it is easy to manifest the look that indicates to others that we have changed. Depending upon the group with whom we associate, we naturally assimilate into and adopt their set of values. I have observed that people simply act like a Christian just by operating inside these circles. When this is the case, we try to do enough of the right things hoping to become what God expects of us. So, is the individual caught in this trap truly born again? I am not the judge only God judges the heart. 3
4 Thirdly, while working in full-time ministry, it has been my experience in working with countless individuals and groups that many born-again believers are living defeated lives. Their heads hang low (inevitable defeat with no hope of living in victory). Their eyes are fixed upon the ground beneath them; all they see are their circumstances [current reality] right in front of them. Their wings are dragging through the mud. The life God already gave them to soar with wings like eagle is a farfetched, idealistic, unrealistic, foggy perception. As long as they see themselves through the old lens they had before God gave them a new identity, they will continue to live this way with no hope of experiencing new life! Fourth, God s mirror of truth for us is the Bible. God continuously tells us how He sees us in His Word. The problem is that our own skewed lens causes us to see only what we believe to be true about ourselves, even when God is telling us a completely different story. He has already given us the lens by which we should see ourselves through. The problem is that our experiences and the enemy are telling us a completely different message about who we truly are. When we believe this lie, the result is continued defeat. When we believe the truth, real life surfaces and we live abundantly, the way God designed for us to live. Let s dive in! Lie: I will never be FREE in this lifetime! TRUTH: Christ has ALREADY set me free. I AM FREE! I had read Scriptures about freedom for years, but continued to believe that it was my responsibility to get free from my many ongoing issues. I believed that Jesus took the punishment that my sins deserved. I believed that by trusting in His performance the work of the cross and His resurrection that I would have a home in heaven and be given new life in Him. For me, there were no doubts about salvation. I fully embraced and understood that Jesus conquered death, hell, and the grave for believers who place their trust in Him. However, I failed to realize that He also purchased our freedom, which is available in this lifetime. I believed that Christ did His thing on the cross 2000 years ago and therefore is now removed from any responsibility of keeping us free. I thought since His work was finished, I was fully responsible for maintaining my own freedom. If this is you, then good luck! How s that been working for you? Have you been at a place where you believed your freedom was your own responsibility? Explain. Do we have a responsibility? Absolutely! Our responsibility is to choose absolute truth and allow the penetrating work of God s Spirit to produce the results that truth brings into your life FREEDOM! If you continue attempting to do things to get free, you will only dig yourself deeper into a performance trap as you strive for acceptance and freedom. As long as you continue to do things to obtain freedom, you will continue to stay in deep-rooted bondage. Jesus will wait for you to completely give
up on yourself so that He can rescue you from yourself! This is another aspect of the beauty of the cross that so many believers are missing today. 5 Does this sound too simple? Explain. My personal experiences with failure, broken commitments, and sin led me to believe that there must be something that I was not doing right or else God would be rewarding me for my efforts. His reward was for me to continue down a slippery slope until I reached the bottom. He knew it was only then that I would be forced to place my complete trust in Him instead of myself and my own efforts. His response to my efforts was not what I expected, yet it was exactly what I needed. What are you learning about your misplaced efforts to help God? God already knew that we could not do enough to maintain our own freedom. That s why Jesus was sent by the Father to do something for us that we could never do for ourselves remove the barrier of sin between us and God, give us His life, purchase for us a home in heaven, and give freedom to those who place their faith in Christ while we are here on earth. This would be a great time to refer to the target and your ultimate and current reality lenses. What you believe determines how you think and behave. If you believe that you are responsible to maintain your own freedom, your life will be consumed with doing good things for the wrong reasons. When you do good things for the purpose of maintaining your good standing with God or to maintain your freedom, wrong motives are directing your actions. You will not experience true freedom while being driven by the wrong motives. However, God is so awesome that He will allow wrong motives and failures to drive you straight to Him. That s how BIG He is. He takes our stupidity and capitalizes on it to bring a greater knowledge of Himself to us! God is not pleased by a wonderful performance; He is pleased as you trust in the completed work of Christ and relax in the freedom that you already have in Him! Remember, the pressure is off! If you are born again, you are already accepted by God because you received His redemption plan that was brought to you through His Son. That alone validates you as pleasing to Him. He is most pleased when you realize the full work that was performed and completed on the cross and choose to
rest in Christ. As this truth settles into your belief system, your motivation for why you do what you do naturally changes. You will continue to do good things, but you will do them because you are so thankful that the requirement and pressure to perform has been lifted. Jesus performed for you so that you do not have to perform. It is this truth that sets our heart free to enjoy the simplicity of the relationship with God and rest in His smile as He looks at you through the blood of Jesus. The beginning stages of true freedom are found within the revelation of this truth! Meditate upon this Scripture for a few minutes. Spend some 95/5 time as you allow God the freedom to reveal the truth of this Scripture to your heart. Read it a few more times, then write out what God is revealing. Colossians 3:2-3: Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 6 If you look at your life through your current reality lens, you will have a hard time grasping the truths being presented in Getting Your Life ON-TARGET. That is why we challenge you to view your circumstances through the ultimate lens. Truth is true whether you feel it, think it, believe it, act on it, respond to it, see it, or live it. Truth is true because no matter what pressures, stresses or circumstances come against it, it always remains unchanged! Truth cannot change because God is truth and He is unchangeable! However, you will receive the benefit of the freedom that truth produces as you choose to believe Him. Which will you believe? The lie or the truth?